Tag Archives: Michael Posner

On August 16th, Bahraini political activist Nabeel Rajab was sentenced to three years in jail for his peaceful role in protests critical of Bahrain’s monarchy. He had already been in prison since July 9th, when he was convicted of libel after sending a tweet that criticized Bahrain’s Prime Minister.

But despite all of this, the US State Department did not publicly call on its military ally to release Nabeel Rajab until after his three year sentence had already been handed down.

Why did the US State Department wait so long to come to Nabeel Rajab’s defense?

A huge thank you to supporters of our Bahrain actions over the last few days calling on the US State Department to speak out more forcefully on unfair military trials.

More than 16,000 people have signed our online action. Further, the response to our Twitter action was absolutely fantastic, with people not only from the US but from around the world magnifying our call (go crowd!).

The Twitter action was a first for me and I didn’t really know what to expect in terms of response or outcome. I was positively surprised with both. I decided to use a new, very useful tool called storify to track the action—and the response to it!